Well there might be something going on here as viewtopic.php?f=50&t=21903 has no X either. I don't have time to test 5.4 at the moment but the daily is booting fine for me so I would assume 5.4 should be booting.

Have you tried the lowest common denominator video driver, namely the generic VESA driver (xdriver=vesa)? If that gets you to a desktop and you then install to your HDD, you can then boot the HDD and try installing the various NVIDIA dirvers from a console to see if you can get video to work with your NVIDIA GPU.

ashley194 wrote:Find it hard to understand why some Linux distro's just work out-of-the-box, whereas some others take more work.

Dunno, ashley194. I suppose it depends on which kernel version a distro ships with, what functionality the developers have enabled or disabled in the kernel configuration, which versions of drivers they ship the distro with (in-kernel drivers or external modules), whether they have opted to use open-source or closed-source video drivers, which version of those drivers they have decided to use, which version of the X.Org Server they have decided to use, whether they have opted to use just ALSA or whether they have opted to use ALSA plus PulseAudio, and a whole host of other variables. When people say "Distro X works on my machine but Distro Y does not", it's because the distros are as similar as apples and oranges. I have been lucky: on the five or so PCs that I have installed SL on to date, all have worked. External factors can also come into play. For example the recent spate of problems with Internet access due to ipv6. Some older routers don't handle it properly, but you won't see a problem if a particular distro happens to use a kernel with ipv6 disabled.